SEWSA 2016 Intersectionality in the New Millennium: An Assessment of Culture, Power, and Society

Necro-Crip Affinities and the Death of Intersectionality

Room 214, West Center

The association of the chronically and severely disabled with death and dying has pervaded western culture such that preventing disability from contaminating the human race has become morally and socially acceptable. Rightfully, disability advocates have protested the ideologies that persistently deny the value of disabled people and, particularly when rendered immobile or non-verbal, question their very liveliness. However, feminist science and technology studies (STS) scholars are encouraging a movement away from the traditional western dichotomy of life and death, which may provide an opportunity to crip the ableist discourses that discipline western subjects. Does the attention to the agency of matter in feminist STS enhance theoretical interrogations of objectification and dehumanization? Can death be cripped, and can intersectionality be “killed”? To begin this work, this paper employs new feminist materialisms and disability theory to highlight the emergence of a necro-crip affinity enabled by the science of brain death. Using brain death, particularly the postmortem pregnancy, as an object lesson, it additionally expands intersectionality beyond the realm of the living in hopes of reconciling humanist and posthumanist onto-epistemologies.